It immediately appeals to me more than getting out a leaf blower or rake, bagging up leaves and finding somewhere to store them while they break down into leaf mould. (Never mind actually putting them in a car and taking them to the local dump!)
Raking leaves was the most tedious task of my childhood. My mother ushered us all out for hours of back-breaking tedium.
Yet today’s ‘leave the leaves’ campaign on social media suggests that much of this work was unnecessary. Others suggest, however, that leaving the leaves could damage your garden or even your health.
Having left leaves on my own borders for 15+ years with no ill-effects, I’ve done some more research to see where we can leave the leaves and where they would be better swept up.
Can you leave the leaves on borders?
You can leave leaves on most borders without any problem. They will break down over the winter and by spring, you’ll hardly notice them.
As they break down, they’ll return nutrition to the soil.
Piles of leaves also offer habitats to wildlife. People have pointed out – correctly – that this includes slugs and snails. But it also includes slug and snail predators, such as hedgehogs, frogs, toads, slow-worms and ground beetles.
There are only two potential problems with leaving leaves on borders.
Firstly, some trees have very thick, big leaves that take a long time to break down. The leaves from my Magnolia grandiflora can cover smaller plants, such as Saxifrage ‘London Pride’. This would deprive them of light, so I do push them off (when I notice).
Do leaves blow around the garden if you leave them?
Many people see leaves blowing around a city street. They assume that leaves on borders will blow around the garden in the
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There are a bazillion bigleaf hydrangeas out there. So when a new one comes out, it really needs to stand out from the crowd. Meet Eclipse® bigleaf hydrangea—a unique selection with dark purple leaves that hold their color throughout the gardening season. In summer the dramatic foliage is accompanied by striking cranberry blooms with white centers.
The Isles of Scilly are like an idealised version of England – where the sun always shines, the food is wonderful, there’s no traffic and no one locks their doors! To say the sun always shines is an exaggeration, but they’re among the sunniest and mildest places in the UK – sea breezes mean it’s never too hot or humid and thanks to the Jetstream, they almost never have frost.
Boasting some of Britain’s most beautiful countryside, the Lake District, in the north-west corner of England, is a draw for anyone with a love of the outdoors. Its hills and mountains, including England’s highest, Scafell Pike at 978m, attract walkers and climbers, while in the valley bottoms, vast lakes, such as Windermere and Ullswater, invite quiet contemplation.
Deck the halls with boughs of holly—or don’t. Decorating for the holidays the traditional way, with lights, wreaths, and a tree full of ornaments, isn’t for everyone. If you want to bring the seasonal spirit into your home without dragging boxes of holiday knick-knacks out of storage, you’re in luck. There are plenty of ways to get your home feeling festive, and not a single bough of holly is necessary. To learn how to execute a holiday-inspired home design—one without Santas or stockings—we tapped designer Gideon Mendelson for his expert advice.
LET THE seed shopping season begin. The 2024 offerings are being loaded into seed-catalog websites, and the earliest print catalogs are already arriving in our mailboxes, as if to help soften the separation anxiety we may feel if we’ve already put our gardens to bed for the winter.
The Piet Oudolf field at Hauser & Wirth in Somerset is the much-photographed and universally adored example of a style of planting that has been gathering momentum since the Victorian era. In defiance of an increasingly industrialised landscape, garden-making has steadily become more conscious of the vitality and importance of wilder and naturalistic landscapes as they disappear in an ever-more urban world. But it was Piet Oudolf who has transformed this yearning for the wild into a widely recognised style, one which has arguably been the defining characteristic of contemporary garden design over the last 20 years.
Most ornamental grasses will stay intact through the latter part of the year, providing useful colour and structure in the autumn, when herbaceous plants are dying back. Some are particularly vibrant, picking up on the colours of the trees to echo their shades of russet and yellow, but with lower, softer silhouettes and lots of movement. Using them is easy. Weave them into a herbaceous border, or create more impact in larger gardens by repeat planting, as Piet Oudolf did at Scampston Hall in North Yorkshire, with his sinuous banks of Molinia caerulea subsp. caerulea 'Poul Petersen'. Some grasses are deciduous while others are evergreen. It is the deciduous grasses that can dramatically change colour during the autumn.
The USDA recently released a new Plant Hardiness Zone Map, and although you may have used the interactive map in the past, it got its first full revamp in over a decade.
‘Marvels of Monmouthshire’ takes in the lovely scenery of this part of the world and a selection of special gardens, chosen by Sisley Garden Tours to be in their full summer glory. Many of the gardens have been featured in The English Garden magazine.